Help Importing Contacts into Gmail

[ralber]

Okay, my world has moved mostly smoothly to Google's embrace. I successfully made the jump from Thunderbird to Gmail and Google Calendar. But getting my 2000+ contacts into Gmail looks very daunting.

Has anybody found a reliable way to get all of info about each of my contacts into Gmail records with addresses going into an address field, faxes going into a fax field, etc. etc. So far I haven't found anything that doesn't just dump (or synch) Thunderbird address records into Gmail contact Note fields.

Help!

--------- Rick

 

[dkaufman1]

I wish I could be helpful..but I have researched and researched this. Gmail's import is really lame and horrid.

I even tried the old, reverese mapping, where I created a super user in Gmail with tons of contact info to get their "map" and then re-mapped all my columns in my csv to match and then attempted to import and after all that, no dice.

It really irks me that it is so tough. I also have all my contacts in VCF format which gmail has no problem exporting, but again will not import.

I also tried emailing a VCF card as an attachment and again no dice.

My frustration level is very high on this front.

 

[MarvinAndroid]

I'm not sure what Thunderbird is... but I exported my Outlook contacts into a comma deliminated text file... and Gmail imported most of them without a problem. 90 contacts in about 5 minutes... definitely saved me some time.

 

[dkaufman1]

Thunderbird is the cousin to Firefox, also made by Mozilla Foundation. It is an elegant open source email solution for the desktop.

 

[upgrayedd]

There is a Thunderbird add-on called Zindus that synchronizes your Thunderbird Personal Address Book with your Gmail contracts. That's how I got all my Thunderbird contacts into Gmail.

 

[upgrayedd]

Zindus gets everything into the right fields (not Notes)

 

[johnkzin]

There's also gContactsSync ... though, I'm not very fond of it.

 

[richy240]

I'm using gSyncIt! and I love it. Had a few speed bumps to in the beginning, but now all is well and sync'ing happens without me even knowing! It was $10 and well worth every penny.

 

[johnkzin]

I'm using gSyncIt! and I love it. Had a few speed bumps to in the beginning, but now all is well and sync'ing happens without me even knowing! It was $10 and well worth every penny.

Uh, gsyncit doesn't meet the OP's requirements, as it doesn't sync with Thunderbird, just Outlook.

 

[richy240]

Uh, gsyncit doesn't meet the OP's requirements, as it doesn't sync with Thunderbird, just Outlook.

Yes, of course. That's my bad.

 

[ppcinfo]

I just spent the last 3 hours working on getting my 400+ contacts from Outlook 2007 into Google contacts. Simply exporting my contacts to a CSV file from Outlook and importing into gmail contacts didn't work (a lot of my data didn't import, like the addresses!).

I searched around and didn't find a good solution. So here's what I ended up doing:

1) Export Outlook 2007 contacts to CSV file (DOS format)
2) Created one sample contact in Gmail (filling out all the relevant fields that I felt were important) and exporting that single contact to a CSV file.
3) Now that I now know the column format that Gmail wants for importing CSV data, I proceeded to write some PHP code to read all the data in my Outlook CSV file into write out a new CSV file in the Gmail contact format.

My biggest concern, was getting my phone numbers, addresses, and notes converted over correctly. BTW, I used PHP coding because I felt it had easy routines for parsing out the CSV data. Even with my PHP script, I still had to edit and converted data a bit.

In the end, I got all my contacts imported into Gmail just the way I like it. Google needs to make some of this stuff more easier...

ppcinfo

 

[dkaufman1]

Google needs to make some of this stuff more easier...

This sums up all the threads on this topic. AGREED!

 

[rivviepop]

Hey y'all, new here. I had the same pain and wrote some of my fixes down for other coworkers switching to the G1 to get their contacts "fixed".

http://tacticalvim.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/fix-your-gmail-contacts-to-be-g1-android-friendly/

Hope this helps some folks out there, it was a pain in the tuckus to get all these fixed. In my case, I downloaded my contacts in VCARD format from where I store them (http://www.mobical.net/) and found an online vcard-to-gmailcsv web page, ran it through that then imported.

http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/

I'm not saying this is the best website out there, but it at least did a lot of the work for me -- it can convert to LDIF as well (for Thunderbird import), and I know there's a Thunderbird -> GMail sync tool/addon floating around out there somewhere...